It ran on Broadway for so long it became a New York institution and a cultural punch line. But for all its self-absorption and the ways its "edge" has dulled over the decades, A Chorus Line still has the power to move, amuse and thrill.

Every Little Step is a terrific documentary history lesson about how Michael Bennett rounded up a bunch of New York singing, acting dancers, interviewed them and found out what they "did for love," back in January of 1974. The tape recordings of that marathon session still exist.

"I think we're all pretty interesting," the dancer-choreographer Bennett says on the tape. "And maybe there's a show in that."

Indeed.

Every Little Step packages vintage interviews with the late Bennett, along with others from that legendary original cast, and sprinkles them throughout the eight months of cattle calls and audition callbacks as every singing, acting dancer in New York takes her or his shot at joining the new 2006 production of the play that made the nameless, faceless "chorus" a star.

Composer Marvin Hamlisch remembers the creation, the changes to the show as it workshopped its way toward Broadway in the '70s. Singers of various abilities try on "At the Ballet," "God I Hope I Get It," "What I did For Love" and other songs that have become part of the Broadway canon. And we see and root for dancers young and old, tall and short, gay and straight, performing in audition montages that play, at first, like an early episode of American Idol, then grow more polished and more anguished as director Bob Avian and his team close in on that final cast.

"EAT NAILS!" choreographer Baayork Lee, who was "Connie" in the original cast, exhorts her dancers. They show off their moves and their bodies and struggle against "type" to win a role in a show that sort of struck a blow against body type-casting in its day. Every one is an underdog. Well, except for Charlotte d'Amboise, daughter of famed Broadway dancer Jacques d'Amboise. Filmmakers James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo aren't able to get as close to these new players as those original Chorus Line interviews. With so many to follow, they shortchange pretty much everybody trying out. But we meet the cocky kid, the struggling older dancer, the small town girl, veterans and novices who want to play Bebe, Val, Maggie, Mike and Paul.

And in one electric moment, we remember just how moving this show can be. Avian, who worked with Bennett on that original show 35 years ago and has been around it all his life, bursts into tears at the perfect "Paul," an actor in an audition doing lines Avian's heard thousands of times, doing them so movingly you can't help but cry. That's when we all remember that, yes, they look in the mirror too much, but they suffer for an art that will toss them aside at 40. They really are doing "it for love."

NAVAL STATION NORFOLK — The Navy on Saturday commissioned the USS John Warner, adding a 12th Virginia-class submarine to the fleet and celebrating the legacy of its namesake, the retired senator who was hailed as a statesman.